The space shuttle Atlantis has docked at the International Space Station for the last time, and astronauts will now spend a week unloading a year's worth of supplies.

Emotions were running high for the final docking at the space station.

Atlantis will be retired after this flight and no other NASA shuttles will make the journey.

The link-up took place 386 kilometres high just over New Zealand after the spacecraft performed its habitual slow backflip so that the ISS crew could take pictures of its heat shield before it clasped onto the lab, NASA said.

As the hatches swung open the astronauts greeted each other with handshakes and hugs.

Four US crew members are aboard the shuttle, which is delivering food, clothes and other provisions for the astronauts staying on the space station.

The flawless docking followed a successful lift-off on the weekend for this historic two-week flight.

The lift-off from the Kennedy Space Centre was watched by hundreds of thousands of tourists and marked the last-ever blast-off of the three-decade long program.

The flight marks the end of an era for NASA, leaving Americans with no actively operating government-run human spaceflight program and no method for sending astronauts to space until private industry comes up with a new capsule, likely by 2015 at the earliest.

With the shuttle gone, only Russia's three-seat Soyuz capsules will be capable of carrying astronauts to the ISS at a cost of more than $US50 million per seat.

Atlantis is carrying 3,000 kilograms of supplies, which the combined crew of 10 - four aboard the shuttle's STS-135 mission and six aboard the ISS as part of Expedition 28 - will transfer during the mission.

A failed ammonia pump will then be transferred to the shuttle payload bay for return to Earth.

Monday will be occupied with setting up the transfer of the Raffaello multipurpose module, which holds the extra supplies, from the shuttle to the Earth-facing side of the station's Harmony module.